Month: July 2001

The author’s personality comes shining through in this weblog. She’s smart, funny and opinionated and a joy to get to know.



Some of her posts had me laughing out loud, in particular her “Not Do lists.” Other posts had me shaking my head at other people’s stupidity. Yet others had me thinking about things I never thought of before. Her posts are well-written, easy to read and don’t use a lot of ‘net jargon.



But there’s so much more to this site than the weblog. There are movie reviews, a webzine and a “growing guide” to “The Mod Squad.” (Yes, the television show.)



The layout is clean and simple, and easy to navigate.



All in all, I had a very pleasant visit to this site and will probably return often.punk princess

*I want to point out that a some of what I say will be negative and be intended as constructive criticism*



Well after some time off I’ve sorted out what’s going on in my life so I decided to write some reviews until my password expires.



Anyway, this site pretty basic when it comes to layout and page numbers, but is anything-but in the way of “bloggage.” This guy has so much to say and presents it logically. Some webmasters have trouble bringing together their wealth of information that they want to share into an orderly manner. His blogs are interesting and better yet fun to read. It is though, more of a guy site, which a better percentage of weblogs are, but it limits the number of people that will come back. Another thing that I enjoy about his blogs is that he lays it out there and will let you know where he stands on topics. He is not a person that has a link to another site and says “that is right on.” Sometimes I agree with his views and sometimes I don’t. There is a level of “Adult material” (porn) on the site but it is linked to a page and there is none currently present on the homepage. Just an FYI, this “Adult Material” is not that of which you really go there to see, its his views on society with a picture attached to it.



The site is deserving of a decent rating. The html could be a lot better and may come along in the future. That’s not why we are here though. The blog is very interesting but about half of the posts are other peoples work that he will be talking about. It’s not bad but it gets a little old hearing about how so and so said something dumb. I know that doesn’t happen in all of them but when it does it gets repetitive. The rest of the site is very good in all respects and I hope hat the Webmaster will continue working as hard as it seems and one day this may be a 5 point site.

Killing The Joy

Dismissing this blog because it’s on an overused blogspot template or because it seems as if it’s primarily links to news stories is a mistake. If you do that, you might miss the “vacation” link that opens up to beautiful pictures of Jak’s vacation in British Columbia.



As for the blog itself, there’s nothing out of the ordinary in most of what he writes about. It’s primarily the writer’s observations on top news stories or stories he finds interesting. He rarely delves very deep, and I think that’s a mistake because his writing about personal issues is much more interesting. His post “Why do men still tip their barbers?” is quite interesting, in fact. But I had to muddle through a lot mediocre posts to get there. It’s not that the other posts are bad, it’s just that they’re not particularly unique.



He also has links to his other blogs on the arts, religion and paleo-anthropology. Again, they are primarily links and his observations on them. I’m not sure if he’s given up on these because two of them haven’t been updated since late September; the other on October 21.



His writing, however, is very easy to read. I think he would be best served by giving us more personal stories, and more photography.

Jak’s Blog

The first thing I noticed about this weblog is its stark appearance. I assume he was going for the less is more look, but in this case I think less really is less.



Aside from that, I really enjoyed Nik’s writing style. He draws you in and makes you want to read more to get to know him. He doesn’t shy away from writing about extremely personal things. For example, he writes about a girl he did hook up with but shouldn’t have, and a girl he wants to start a relationship with but can’t. There’s also a lot of stream of consciousness writing, which really works at getting the reader into his head.



I like the way his “pointless submenu” is set up. Included in this are Nik’s about me/about this site page; list of archive titles, which include “being cute versus being hot;” “things I wish I would have said;” “believing in love;” and “eating at subway;” and a section on what graphics program and fonts he uses and why.



Nik says he’ll be updating only semi-periodically, and hasn’t posted since Oct. 31, but I think his wit, insight and observations of a 20-year-old college student make his posts worth the wait.

designpunk

My first response when the page loaded was what the heck is going on here? Big green table that acts as a logo of sorts and below that a bunch of links. Then below that some random stuff, then the weblog entries by each date. The design of the site is very lacking, and looks like it was created by a WYSIWYG editor.



So I look around the site a little bit, and the entire site at least looks the same. Again, I kept saying, there is something wrong with the design of this site.



So finally I started clicking on the weblog links that were listed by date. Seeing as the site has only been around since July, I started at the very beginning to see how the weblog has evolved.



Here is what I found. I found a new to the web user who was writing about her SOHO experiences with building and maintaining the website. I also found that she was using Front Page. That explains a lot of the design issues. I hope that I am correct in that the author doesn’t use a blog tool like Big Blog Tool or Blogger, but rather, writes each page daily, in Front Page and then uploads it. At the bottom of each of her posts are links back and next, with some of the links being broken, but at least there was a directory link also that I could click on to find the next post.



The entries, unlike the design and layout of the site, were very good. I was very interested in what was going on with the site and the building of it and what not. She also throws her opinion into things, which made reading them even more enjoyable. Also, the updates are frequent, about one a day, and of good length.



If you are starting a small business or have one and are looking at putting it on the web, this is a definite read. If the site gets redesigned and fixes the broken links, it will be a much better site overall. But don’t get let a design stop you from reading a good weblog.

Diary of a Mad Web Lackey